Chemicals, Chemicals, Chemicals!

Did you know that Carnegie Mellon has over 34,000 separate chemical entries in our Chemtracker inventory system? And that roughly 60% of them are in Mellon Institute?

The Chemtracker inventory system has been in place here for roughly seven years and we are confident that we have captured the inventory information from nearly all of our over 300 laboratories, studios and workshops. These programs, and your updated entries in it, have been invaluable to the University. It has provided prompt safety information, provided many labs with "spare" or other needed chemicals for their work (without them having to buy it), and most successfully, providing us with information to evaluate our building's compliance with building code chemical storage amounts.

International Building Codes, which have been adopted by the City of Pittsburgh, limit the quantities of various chemical classes that are permitted in a building. Chemtracker helps us determine our compliance with these limits (which for certain classes are very, very low!) There are a number of areas of campus where we will be working over the next several months, to reduce chemical amounts of our more highly hazardous materials.